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Given that Canada consistently ranks among the best education systems in the world, it seems reasonable to conclude that most teachers in our schools are doing an exemplary job of educating and nurturing our children. But what happens when this is not true? How much are parents allowed to know about the conduct of the people who they entrust with their children?

According to a recent nationwide investigation by CBC's Marketplace, that seems to depend largely on where you live. The show profiled several disturbing cases where teachers were found guilty of bullying, assaulting, and engaging in sexual conversations with students. While instances like these are rare, the problem is that most provinces provide no information whatsoever about cases of teacher misconduct. Rather, government officials cite privacy concerns as the reason teacher disciplinary records are not made public.

But in a publicly funded education system, it seems absurd that the privacy rights of members of the teaching profession should trump the public's right to know about teachers who have violated the standards of the very profession itself.

Ontario is only one of two provinces where teacher records are made public. Anyone can go online to the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) website and look up the records of any of its members. Mind you, the OCT only started providing full disclosure of teacher misconduct cases in response to reporting from the Star back in 2011. But parents in Ontario are much better off than their counterparts across the country.

Yet that does not mean all is well here either. When a complaint is filed against a teacher, it takes the OCT an average of four years for it to be investigated. This isn’t good for anyone. If the complaint turns out to be valid, this means the teacher potentially continues teaching many other children. And in the cases of spurious complaints, that teacher is forced to spend years living under a cloud of suspicion before having their name cleared.

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But what is perhaps most disturbing are the cases where teachers are found guilty of misconduct so bad that they are removed from the school — only to be placed in another school. This happened in the case of a Toronto teacher who was found guilty of assaulting three students, and was then transferred to another school where he assaulted yet another. Under this practice known as the “dance of the lemons” or “passing the trash,” the problem teacher is removed from the school in order to assuage the concerns of the parent community, but is then placed in a new school where the teacher has no history or notoriety.

In its most pernicious form, the teacher is transferred to a school where the parent community isn’t particularly active, and so is unlikely to find out about the teacher’s history or raise a fuss about their behaviour. Often these are schools located in low socioeconomic status neighbourhoods where parents lack the time or social capital to advocate effectively for their children and hold schools to account. Immoral doesn’t even begin to describe this practice. If a teacher's conduct is so egregious and unprofessional as to justify their removal from one school, they shouldn’t be teaching at any school.

The broader issue is that once a teacher gets into the classroom, there is very little accountability or oversight. For most teachers, this autonomy is not a problem, and is what allows them to be innovative and adapt to the needs of their students. However it is also what allows ineffective teaching or abusive behaviour to continue indefinitely until someone files a complaint.

It would be far better if our education systems took a more proactive approach. Regular teacher evaluations which incorporate feedback from all students would go a long way in identifying problems early, while also helping to improve the practice of all teachers. This is currently being done in Massachusetts, where the Department of Education worked with teachers and their unions to develop student feedback surveys that are incorporated into all teacher evaluations. If we want a stronger teaching profession and greater public confidence in our education system, there is no reason we should not do the same.

Sachin Maharaj is a PhD student in educational policy at OISE and a teacher in the TDSB.

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